Lucien Bull was a pioneer of early high speed photography. A Dubliner who moved to France, Bull worked with Étienne-Jules Marey to develop techniques to record and study motion. Much of their work involved recording successive still images (a la flip-book style) to record and render motion. This was accomplished via what came to be known as the “gun camera” due to its physical appearance. However, this still image differs in that it exhibits multiple, successive, high-speed exposures to record the motion of a lunge on a single negative.

Our thanks goes out to Maeve White of Bryn Mawr College Library and Information Technology Services for her permission to share her work-related photograph of the original negative (left). It was processed into the positive above.